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Opinions On Nintendo Age?

So I recently watched a Gaming Historian video about the Sharp Game Television. Never knew these things existed, now I'm intrigued, and would like to do some research in obtaining one. The Sharp C1 looks even more impressive, but this is all dreamworld for now.

I looked on ebay and found two of them, all beat the fuck up and missing key components. I then looked at another search result and up popped a thread on the Nintendo Age forums. It looks like they are trying to track down every single one of these things, even going as far as a mod calling them "our" televisions. They seem to do nothing but raise prices on the market. I've thought about registering at this site but browsing thru, it comes across as a bunch of rich pricks and elitist collectors. Not to mention that dumbass annoying Solomons Key thing in the corner when browsing with a phone/tablet. What the hell is that?

Yeah... I only post on Digital Press. I lurked here for years first, but I like that this is generally an older forum in member age and experience that seems a little more grounded as human beings and less prone to elitist nonsense. I'm sure they have some great members as well or even share quite a few here, but I prefer a more seasoned crowd that's less prone to getting swept up in trends.

So I recently watched a Gaming Historian video about the Sharp Game Television. Never knew these things existed, now I'm intrigued, and would like to do some research in obtaining one. The Sharp C1 looks even more impressive, but this is all dreamworld for now.

I looked on ebay and found two of them, all beat the fuck up and missing key components. I then looked at another search result and up popped a thread on the Nintendo Age forums. It looks like they are trying to track down every single one of these things, even going as far as a mod calling them "our" televisions. They seem to do nothing but raise prices on the market. I've thought about registering at this site but browsing thru, it comes across as a bunch of rich pricks and elitist collectors. Not to mention that dumbass annoying Solomons Key thing in the corner when browsing with a phone/tablet. What the hell is that?

Why is that place way more active than this forum?

They are active due to them being speculators, that's it, the only thing one would go to that cesspool is for the option to keep order of your own collection.

Narrower focus, harbors avid collectors, crap-tons of cash flow through the buy/sell boards (largely due to the first two parts), participates in gaming community events, holds it's own community events and, regardless of how people around here feel about Dain, NA's fearless leader didn't ditch them at the drop of a hat.

The kind of people who see videogames as legitimate financial investments are not my kind of people. When I first joined this forum, the larger part of the community was into gaming. Before I joined, I lurked, and I recall the days when retro games were unbelievably easy to come by. Obscure stuff (even relatively obscure) like the TG16 and Jaguar were things that people wanted to get rid of. They weren't worth anything. Speculators such as these and eBay have sucked so much of the fun out of it.

Earthbound is one that really baffles me. I remember Best Buy practically giving these games away in the late 90s ($25, brand new) and even Funcoland for a while was selling it for a similar price used. It's not a rare game. It's a game that got some hype and has a very vocal following, which has caused hysteria about it and speculators saw that coming and are now able to scalp people for a game that you couldn't even give away 15 years ago.

People trying to buy up every single instance of something is just an extreme example of that kind of thing. It's no better than ticket scalping, really.

If I recall right the North American Sharp television is just using the standard composite output of the NES, I remember seeing one in person years ago and didn't consider the image anything special. You'd probably get a better picture out of a Commodore 1702 monitor or any CRT made much later like the Sony Wega if you were sticking with the system's stock A/V jacks.

They will specifically take it to a point where they will TELL YOU what you can and can NOT do with YOUR game. … They will hunt down people, attack them, seek to get them banned from other online services if their attempted person does something they truly dislike. … There are members of that site who went on to creating such basic things like replacement back stickers for the NES and SNES carts, others who dare make the plain white cardboard tray for big box games like Earthbound -- and they'd go after the member, and if that member would NOT remove those items for sale from the likes of ebay and elsewhere (which they didn't) they got banned. Banned for something off site, because they felt it harmed the socialist collective of gamers there because it could bring down the value of their own games and things that go with them.

Yep that's become a hallmark trait of NA. I've experienced it too. They try to police the entire collecting and retro-gaming world, even outside of their community. They vehemently attack ideas that are outside of their own way of thinking, they try to TELL other people how to act and what to do with THEIR games, and the tragedy of it all is the basis of this behavior is to protect the perceived monetary value that they think their games have, instead of focusing on the aesthetic, historical, and emotional value. For a forum with such potential, it's the saddest thing I've ever seen.

I'll speak on two issues I've had there, but please just judge for yourself.

1.) Any time I've looked on their buy/sell forum for a single or group of games, I've always found eBay prices to be cheaper. Definitely odd considering how great/respected our own buy/sell forum is here and has been for years.

2.) I don't make it a habit to read the site often but on those rare times I hunker down and dive in I'm always surprised with the amount of pure hissy fitting and rage going on directed at collectors, eBay, craigslst, other forums. I mean if you're a grown adult and your spending your time that way.....yipes.